Pastors
for Peace speaking tour arrives in Little Rock on Saturday,
April 29th, and will speak at a meeting hosted by the
Arkansas Coalition for Peace & Justice (ACPJ.)

The meeting,
starting at 7 pm and lasting about 75 minutes, takes place
at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock, located at 1818
Reservoir Road.

Pastors for Peace,
also called “Friendshipment Caravan,” has representatives traveling
to 54 cities across America this month, talking about what is taking
place in Cuba today, and emphasizing the changes still needed in US
policy to achieve normal, civilized relations between Cuba and the
US. Pastors for Peace seeks to build upon the openings
created by President Obama which would eventually end the US economic
blockade of Cuba and the restrictions on travel to Cuba that still
apply to US citizens and residents. ACPJ, and others,
believe that a change in US-Cuba relations will be equally beneficial
to citizens of both countries, and would oppose any rollback of these
important gains.

Besides providing
information and answering questions, the evening will highlight
film-maker Jennifer Wager, who has made several short films focusing
on Cuba and Cuba-US relations. One of her films, “Dare to
Dream-Cuba’s Latin American medical School,” will be shown on the
29th. Jennifer is from Newark, and directed “Venezuela
Rising,” and “Against the Silence - Families of the Five Speak
Out.” She was on the IFCO (Interfaith Cuba group) staff
for five years and organized many caravans and delegations. She is
currently on faculty at Essex County College in New Jersey as assistant
professor of communications and new media technology.

Pastors
for Peace have been regular visitors to Little Rock – and ACPJ -
over the past 20 years, having organized caravans to Cuba since 1992
which allowed US citizens an opportunity to express their support for
changing relations with Cuba.

For information,
contact John Coffin, at joticof@aol.com, or at 501 952 8181.

Arkansas Coalition
for Peace & Justice

PO Box 250398

Little Rock, AR
72225

2015

January: Cuba freed 53 political prisoners as part of
its deal to reopen diplomatic relations with the United States.

July: The two countries officially restored full
diplomatic relations in July 2015 more than 50 years after severing them. Although
the US embargo remains officially in place, Obama loosened regulations to allow
more commercial relations.

Disarm/Global
Health Partners (Ed Asner), like PforP, continues its support of Cuba. www.disarm.org

“Again, U.N. Vote Raps Cuba Embargo.”NADG (Oct. 28, 2015). US of B, United States of Bullies. “The General Assembly voted 191-2 to condemn the commercial,
economic and financial embargo against Cuba.”
Who joined USofB? Israel. This is the 24th year of UN
General Assembly condemnation and USofB’s vote against. However, Pres. Obama said the vote “didn’t
reflect ‘the spirit of engagement’ between Obama and Cuban President Raul
Castro.

But “Trump Shifts on Cuba,
Says He Would Reverse Obama’s Deal.”CNN
Headline News (Nov. 14, 2016). Because
Obama ended the embargo by executive order that did not require congressional
action, Trump has the power to overturn it.

2016

November 26: Castro died.
NWADG page-one screamerheadline Nov. 27: “Castro’s Death Met
with Rejoicing.” Where? In Miami. I look forward to a book on the prejudiced,
hugely one-side reporting of Castro by US mainstream media during the embargo,
even though trade with Cuba would benefit the US.

December:
Disarm/Global Health Partners’ Year End Report from Asner. It accelerated its medical aid shipments and
collaborations between doctors and medical facilities in the two countries, in
2016 delivering “five medical shipments worth $1,676,189” (letter from Asner). During its 22 years of sending medicines and
medical supplies to Cuba, according to him Disarm raised $131 million.

US TERRORISTIC LAWLESSNESS AGAINST CUBA

Contents
in reverse chronology by publication date

William Blum,
The Anti-Empire Report

WHAT HAS THE USNOT TRIED TO OVERTHROW THE CUBAN
SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT?

TWO ESAYS BY
WILLIAM BLUM

William Blum. “The Anti-Empire Report #144.” March 11th, 2016.

CIA
motto: “Proudly overthrowing the Cuban government since 1959.”

Now what? Did
you think that the United States had finally grown up and come to the
realization that they could in fact share the same hemisphere as the people of
Cuba, accepting Cuban society as unquestioningly as they do that of Canada? The
Washington Post (February 18) reported: “In recent weeks, administration
officials have made it clear Obama would travel to Cuba only if its government
made additional concessions in the areas of human rights, Internet access and
market liberalization.”

Imagine if Cuba insisted that the United
States make “concessions in the area of human rights”; this could mean the
United States pledging to not repeat anything like the following:

Blowing up a
passenger plane full of Cubans in 1976. (In 1983, the city of Miami held a day
in honor of Orlando Bosch, one of the two masterminds behind this awful act;
the other perpetrator, Luis Posada, was given lifetime protection in the same
city.)

Giving Cuban
exiles, for their use, the virus which causes African swine fever, forcing the
Cuban government to slaughter 500,000 pigs.

Infecting Cuban
turkeys with a virus which produces the fatal Newcastle disease, resulting in
the deaths of 8,000 turkeys.

In 1981 an
epidemic of dengue hemorrhagic fever swept the island, the first major epidemic
of DHF ever in the Americas. The United States had long been experimenting with
using dengue fever as a weapon. Cuba asked the United States for a pesticide to
eradicate the mosquito involved but were not given it. Over 300,000 cases were
reported in Cuba with 158 fatalities.

These are but
three examples of decades-long CIA chemical and biological warfare (CBW)
against Cuba. We must keep in mind that
food is a human right (although the United States has repeatedly denied this.

Washington
maintained a blockade of goods and money entering Cuba that is still going
strong, a blockade that President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy
Berger, in 1997 called “the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation
in the history of mankind”.

Attempted to
assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro on numerous occasions, not only in
Cuba, but in Panama, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

In one scheme
after another in recent years, Washington’s Agency for International
Development (AID) endeavored to cause dissension in Cuba and/or stir up
rebellion, the ultimate goal being regime change.

In 1999 a Cuban
lawsuit demanded $181.1 billion in US compensation for death and injury
suffered by Cuban citizens in four decades “war” by Washington against Cuba.
Cuba asked for $30 million in direct compensation for each of the 3,478 people
it said were killed by US actions and $15 million each for the 2,099 injured.
It also asked for $10 million each for the people killed, and $5 million each
for the injured, to repay Cuban society for the costs it has had to assume on
their behalf.

Needless to
say, the United States has not paid a penny of this.

One of the most
common Yankee criticisms of the state of human rights in Cuba has been the
arrest of dissidents (although the great majority are quickly released). But
many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the
United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During
the Occupy Movement, which began in 2011, more than 7,000 people were arrested
in about the first year, many were beaten by police and mistreated while in
custody, their street displays and libraries smashed to pieces. ; the Occupy movement continued until 2014;
thus, the figure of 7,000 is an understatement.)

Moreover, it
must be kept in mind that whatever restrictions on civil liberties there may be
in Cuba exist within a particular context: The most powerful nation in the history
of the world is just 90 miles away and is sworn – vehemently and repeatedly
sworn – to overthrowing the Cuban government. If the United States was simply
and sincerely concerned with making Cuba a less restrictive society,
Washington’s policy would be clear cut:

Call off the
wolves – the CIA wolves, the AID wolves, the doctor-stealer wolves, the
baseball-player-stealer wolves.

Publicly and
sincerely (if American leaders still remember what this word means) renounce
their use of CBW and assassinations. And apologize.

Cease the
unceasing hypocritical propaganda – about elections, for example. (Yes, it’s
true that Cuban elections never feature a Donald Trump or a Hillary Clinton,
nor ten billion dollars, nor 24 hours of campaign ads, but is that any reason
to write them off?)

Pay
compensation – a lot of it.

Sine qua non –
end the God-awful blockade.

Throughout the
period of the Cuban revolution, 1959 to the present, Latin America has
witnessed a terrible parade of human rights violations – systematic, routine
torture; legions of “disappeared” people; government-supported death squads
picking off selected individuals; massacres en masse of peasants, students and
other groups. The worst perpetrators of these acts during this period have been
the military and associated paramilitary squads of El Salvador, Guatemala,
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Haiti and Honduras.
However, not even Cuba’s worst enemies have made serious charges against the
Havana government for any of such violations; and if one further considers
education and health care, “both of which,” said President Bill Clinton, “work
better [in Cuba] than most other countries”
, and both of which are guaranteed by the United Nations “Universal
Declaration of Human Rights” and the “European Convention for the Protection of
Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms”, then it would appear that during the
more-than-half century of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best
human-rights records in all of Latin America.

But never good
enough for American leaders to ever touch upon in any way; the Bill Clinton
quote being a rare exception indeed. It’s a tough decision to normalize
relations with a country whose police force murders its own innocent civilians
on almost a daily basis. But Cuba needs to do it. Maybe they can civilize the
Americans a bit, or at least remind them that for more than a century they have
been the leading torturers of the world.

156

Notes

“Libya:
Transition and U.S. Policy”, updated March 4, 2016.

New York Times, February 28, 2016

Mark Weisbrot,
“Top Ten Ways You Can Tell Which Side The United States Government is On With
Regard to the Military Coup in Honduras”, Common Dreams, December 16, 2009

Roger Morris,
former member of the National Security Council, Partners in Power (1996), p.415. For a comprehensive look at
Hillary Clinton, see the new book by Diane Johnstone, Queen of Chaos.

Any part of
this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to
William Blum as author and a link to williamblum.org is provided.

William Blum is
an author, historian, and U.S. foreign policy critic. He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II;Rogue
State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower;America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy; Freeing the World to Death

Essays on the American Empire

Listen,
Yankee! Why Cuba Matters by Tom Hayden. Seven
Stories, 2015.

Based on unprecedented access to both
Cuban and American officials, a book that offers fresh insight into one of
history's most enigmatic relationships between nation-states—from one of
America's best-known voices of political and social activism.

Listen, Yankee! offers an account of
Cuban politics from Tom Hayden's unique position as an observer of Cuba and as
a US revolutionary student leader whose efforts to mobilize political change in
the US mirrored the radical transformation simultaneously going on in Cuba.

Chapters are devoted to the writings
of Che Guevara, Régis Debray, and C. Wright Mills; the Cuban missile crisis;
the Weather Underground; the assassination of JFK; the strong historical links
between Cuba and Africa; the Carter era; the Clinton era; the Cuban Five; Elián
González; and the December 17, 2014 declaration of normalization by presidents
Obama and Castro.

Hayden puts the present moment into
historical context, and shows how we're finally finding common ground to the
advantage of Cubans and Americans alike.

“Over half a century after C. Wright Mills
published his remarkable account of the Cuban Revolution, Listen, Yankee!, Tom
Hayden continues the conversation. Hayden was there at the beginning. Inspired
by the struggle for freedom in Cuba, Hayden pushed the New Left in the US to
think about the larger world. And he is here at the end—or at least the
beginning of the end—of the decades-long embargo Washington used to contain
Cuba's promise. This book is much more than an account of the politics of the
current thaw: it is a memoir and a meditation, a thoughtful reflection on the
inter-American struggles of activists, intellectuals and politicians for a more
just world.” – Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom,
and Deception in the New World

Cuba … Again … Still …
Forever

Is there
actually a limit? Will the United
States ever stop trying to overthrow the
Cuban government? Entire books have been written documenting the unrelenting
ways Washington has tried to get rid of tiny Cuba’s
horrid socialism – from military invasion to repeated assassination attempts to
an embargo that President Clinton’s National Security Advisor called “the most
pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind”.But nothing has ever come even close
to succeeding. The horrid socialism keeps on inspiring people all over the
world. It’s the darnedest thing. Can providing people free or remarkably
affordable health care, education, housing, food and culture be all that
important?

And now
it’s “Cuban Twitter” – an elaborately complex system set up by the US Agency
for International Development (USAID) to disguise its American origins and
financing, aiming to bring about a “Cuban Spring” uprising. USAID sought to
first “build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then the plan was to push
them toward dissent”, hoping the messaging network “would reach critical mass
so that dissidents could organize ‘smart mobs’ – mass gatherings called at a
moment’s notice – that might trigger political demonstrations or ‘renegotiate
the balance of power between the state and society’.”It’s too bad it’s now been exposed,
because we all know how wonderful the Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, and other “Arab
Springs” have turned out.

Here’s
USAID speaking after their scheme was revealed on April 3: “Cubans were able to
talk among themselves, and we are proud of that.”We are thus asked to believe that
normally the poor downtrodden Cubans have no good or safe way to communicate
with each other. Is the US National Security Agency working for the Cuban
government now?

TheAssociated Press, which
broke the story, asks us further to believe that the “truth” about most things
important in the world is being kept from the Cuban people by the Castro
regime, and that the “Cuban Twitter” would have opened people’s eyes. But what
information might a Cuban citizen discover online that the government would not
want him to know about? I can’t imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with
relatives in the US,
by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami
and other southern cities; both CNN and Telesur (Venezuela,
covering Latin America) are seen regularly on Cuban television”; international
conferences on all manner of political, economic and social issues are held
regularly in Cuba.
I’ve spoken at more than one myself. What – it must be asked – does USAID, as
well as the American media, think are the great dark secrets being kept from
the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?

Those who push this line sometimes point to the serious
difficulty of using the Internet in Cuba. The problem is that it’s
extremely slow, making certain desired usages often impractical. From an
American friend living in Havana:
“It’s not a question of getting or not getting internet. I get internet here.
The problem is downloading something or connecting to a link takes too long on
the very slow connection that exists here, so usually I/we get ‘timed out’.”
But the USAID’s “Cuban Twitter”, after all, could not have functioned at all
without the Internet.

Places like universities, upscale hotels, and Internet cafés get
better connections, at least some of the time; however, it’s rather expensive to
use at the hotels and cafés.

In any
event, this isn’t a government plot to hide dangerous information. It’s a
matter of technical availability and prohibitive cost, both things at least
partly in the hands of the United
States and American corporations. Microsoft,
for example, at one point, if not at present, barred Cuba from using its Messenger
instant messaging service.

Cuba and Venezuela have jointly built a
fiber optic underwater cable connection that they hope will make them less
reliant on the gringos; the outcome of this has not yet been reported in much
detail.

The
grandly named Agency for International Development does not have an honorable
history; this can perhaps be captured by a couple of examples: In 1981, the
agency’s director, John Gilligan, stated: “At one time, many AID field offices
were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant
operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious,
every kind.”

On June 21, 2012, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our
America (ALBA) issued a resolution calling for the immediate expulsion of USAID
from their nine member countries, “due to the fact that we consider their
presence and actions to constitute an interference which threatens the
sovereignty and stability of our nations.”

USAID, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (and the
latter’s subsidiaries), together or singly, continue to be present at regime
changes, or attempts at same, favorable to Washington, from “color revolutions”
to “spring” uprisings, producing a large measure of chaos and suffering for our
tired old world.

Cuba announces arrest of
four Miami
terrorists who were planning to carry out terrorist attacks

Be sure and sign the petition below
this message!

On May 7, Cuban authorities announced
that on April 26, four Cuban right-wing exiles from Miami
were arrested in Havana
for plotting terrorist attacks in Cuban territory. Their names are José
Ortega Amador, Obdulio Rodríguez González, Raibel Pacheco Santos and Félix
Monzón Álvarez.

According
to the report, the men have admitted that they planned to attack military
installations and they had entered Cuba several times since 2013 to
plot their actions.

The
four men who are now detained in Cuba have also admitted that
Santiago Álvarez, Osvaldo Mitat and Manuel Alzugaray were directing their
terror campaign. They are long-time collaborators with CIA operative and
terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.

The
four men who are now detained in Cuba have admitted to Cuban
authorities that Santiago Álvarez, Osvalto Mitat and Manuel Alzugaray were
directing their actions.

Who
is Santiago
Álvarez Fernández Magriña?

Although
he has long been identified in the Miami media
as a Miami
businessman, Álvarez is a terrorist with a long violent history. He has
worked closely for years with CIA agents like Luis Posada Carriles.

He
is most noted for financing Posada's bombing and assassination campaigns and
helping him escape justice. Posada Carriles is responsible for engineering
the bombing of a Cuban airliner, killing 73 people, in 1976. He lives as a
fugitive from justice in Miami.

Here
are just a few facts about the terrorist Álvarez:

·Oct. 12, 1971, Alvarez and CIA agent
Antonio Iglesias Pons machine-gunned the village
of Boca de Sama, eastern Cuba
from a speedboat, killing two men and injuring several people, including a
young girl.

·In 2000, he was involved in the plot
to try to assassinate Fidel Castro in Panama, led by Posada Carriles.
After Posada and three others were convicted, then illegally pardoned by
pro-U.S. Panama president
Mireya Moscoso, Álvarez flew three of the men into Miami on a Lear jet.

·In 2001, he bought 8 assault rifles in
Miami and
thousands of rounds of ammunition. The weapons were later found on three men
arrested in Cuba.
Álvarez ordered them to explode the Tropicana nightclub in Havana with C-4 explosives, potentially
threatening hundreds of people's lives.

·Together with Osvaldo Mitat, he
illegally sneaked Posada Carriles into Miami
on a boat in March 2005. To this day Posada runs free in Miami, continuing to plot with his
terrorist accomplices.

·Álvarez and Mitat were caught with
weapons caches in Miami
(machine guns, C-4 explosives, grenade launchers) in 2005, yet they served
less than two years.

William
M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh.Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden
History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. U of N. Carolina P, 2014.

Challenging
the conventional wisdom of perpetual hostility between the United States and
Cuba--beyond invasions, covert operations, assassination plots using poison
pens and exploding seashells, and a grinding economic embargo--this fascinating
book chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward
rapprochement and reconciliation. Since 1959, conflict and
aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. Now, William M.
LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh present a new and increasingly more relevant
account. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro
after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top secret quest for
normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a "new approach," LeoGrande and Kornbluh reveal a fifty-year
record of dialogue and negotiations, both open and furtive, indicating a path
toward better relations in the future.

LeoGrande and Kornbluh have uncovered hundreds of formerly
secret U.S. documents and conducted interviews with dozens of negotiators,
intermediaries, and policy makers, including Fidel Castro and Jimmy arter. The
authors describe how, despite the political clamor surrounding any hint of
better relations with Havana,
serious negotiations have been conducted by every presidential administration
since Eisenhower's through secret, back-channel diplomacy. Concluding with ten
lessons for U.S.
negotiators, the book offers an important perspective on current political
debates, at a time when leaders of both nations have publicly declared the
urgency of moving beyond the legacy of hostility.

William
M. LeoGrande, professor of government at AmericanUniversity,
is the author ofOur Own
Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992, among other
books.

Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at
the National Security Archive in Washington,
D.C., is the author ofThe Pinochet File: A Declassified
Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, among other books.

USAID PROGRAM TO CUBA FOR REGIME CHANGE; AUTHENTIC EDUCATIONAL
AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES NEEDED.

“Washington’s
Secret ‘Cuba
Twitter’ Program Is the Same Old Policy of Regime Change”

Such
covert operations are not sanitized by running them through USAID and wrapping
them in the rhetoric of “democracy promotion.”

In defiant defense of ZunZuneo,
the Agency for International Development’s secret text messaging program in
Cuba, USAID spokesman Matt Herrick declared the agency “proud” of its Twitter
clone, which, at its height, reached more than 60,000 Cuban cellphone users.
The aim of the program, according to Herrick, “was to create a platform for
Cubans to speak freely among themselves, period.” US officials at first denied
that it had any political intent or sent out any political messages. But AP,
which broke the story, decisively refuted those claims by publishing the
political tweets and interviewing a subcontractor who wrote them.

Administration officials
nevertheless remained unapologetic. In a Senate hearing, USAID administrator
Rajiv Shah insisted the program was not covert, merely “discreet,” and that it
was just trying to “enable open communications” among Cubans. Shah’s defense
was echoed by the usual suspects on Capitol Hill, with Congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen arguing that USAID was simply promoting “God-given values like
freedom, justice or liberty.” TheWashington Posteditorial page jumped
on the bandwagon, declaring that there was nothing wrong with “undermining a
tyranny.”

But fomenting unrest in a country by trying to secretly manipulate its
domestic politics violates US treaty obligations under international law.
The charter of the Organization of American States declares, “No State or group
of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason
whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State,” a
prohibition that is not limited to the use of force. The UN Declaration on the
Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of
States repeats the OAS language and recognizes “the sovereign and inalienable
right of a State freely to determine its own political, economic, cultural and
social systems.” And it imposes on all states the duty “to refrain from any
action or attempt in whatever form or under whatever pretext to destabilize or
to undermine the stability of another State.”

International law has never
prevented Washington from covert intervention,
especially in Latin America. But because
destabilizing other governments violates US treaty obligations, these
operations were conducted secretly by the CIA during most of the Cold War.
ZunZuneo and USAID’s other “democracy promotion” schemes in Cuba remind Latin Americans that Washington still does
not fully respect their sovereignty.

When Barack Obama took office,
hopes ran high in the region that he would break the deadlock in US-Cuban
relations. At the Fifth Summit of the Americas
in April 2009, he pledged a “new beginning” with Cuba. But when the Sixth Summit
convened in April 2012, US
policy was essentially unchanged, and Obama faced a solid phalanx of Latin
American leaders tired of Washington’s
intransigence. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos—a close US ally—and
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff declared that they would skip the next
summit if Cuba
was not invited.

To his credit, Obama has restored
people-to-people connections between the United
States and Cuba. Educational, cultural and
family travel is flourishing. But he has made little headway on state-to-state
relations, nor has he reined in the foreign policy bureaucracy, which tries to
exploit any relaxation of state control in Cuba to undermine its government.
ZunZuneo is a perfect, albeit inept, example. When Raúl Castro legalized the
sale of cellphones, USAID used that opening to build a social media platform it
hoped would mobilize “smart mobs” reminiscent of Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising
and Iran’s “Green Revolution.”

Covert operations designed to
bring about regime change in Cuba
are the direct descendants of the CIA’s political operations of yesteryear.
They are not sanitized by running them through USAID, calling them “discreet”
and wrapping them in the rhetoric of democracy. Three sitting presidents in
Latin America—Rousseff in Brazil, Michelle Bachelet in Chile and José Mujica in
Uruguay—suffered personally at the hands of military dictatorships that US
covert operations helped install a generation ago. Policy-makers in Washington would rather not dwell on the deadly
consequences those operations had for thousands of Latin Americans, but Latin America has not forgotten.

Washington’s relationship with
the region is deteriorating, corroded by a policy toward Cuba that symbolizes a
bygone era of US hegemony—a policy that no other country in the hemisphere
supports. If Obama wants to build the “equal partnership” he originally
promised, he cannot continue to ignore Cuba.

[What
Pres. Obama should do. –D]

Last November, talking to
supporters in Miami about Cuba, Obama said, “We have to be creative. And we have to be thoughtful.
And we have to continue to update our policies.” He could start by replacing
USAID programs targeting Cuba with aboveboard initiatives to support authentic educational and cultural
exchanges—exchanges without the hidden hand of government manipulation or a
hidden agenda of regime change.

During the “Cold War,” former Senator
J. William Fulbright attempted to establish an exchange program with the Soviet Union, but was thwarted by Sovietphobes like
Senator “Scoop” Jackson. Above all else,
exchanges with “enemies” should be the central purpose of faculty, student,
citizen exchanges. We need to improve
understanding and relations with Denmark?

The crippling bigotry against the
Soviet Union by influential US
officials and the majority public sheep
has been iterated for fifty years against Cuba. Again no attempt to be better acquainted
through exchanges. But private groups
may, and The Nation is leading the
way. Working in conjunction with The Nation, Cuba Educational Travel
organized an educational program June 1-8 bringing together US citizens and
Cubans from many walks of life. Hosts
were Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National
Security Archive and author of several books on Cuba; and Katrina vanden Heuvel,
editor and publishers of The Nation.

The Economic War
Against Cuba:

A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade bySalim
Lamrani; prologue by Wayne S. Smith;
foreword by Paul Estrade; translated by Larry Oberg. 2013.

142 pagesMarch 2013

It is impossible to fully understand Cuba
today without also understanding the economic sanctions levied against it by
the United States.
For over fifty years, these sanctions have been upheld by every presidential
administration, and at times intensified by individual presidents and acts of
Congress. They are a key part of the U.S.
government’s ongoing campaign to undermine the Cuban Revolution, and stand in
egregious violation of international law. Most importantly, the sanctions are
cruelly designed for their harmful impact on the Cuban people.

In this concise and sober account, Salim Lamrani explains
everything you need to know about U.S.
economic sanctions against Cuba:
their origins, their provisions, how they contravene international law, and how
they affect the lives of Cubans. He examines the U.S. government’s own official
documents to expose what is hiding in plain sight: an indefensible, vicious,
and wasteful blockade that has been roundly condemned by citizens around the
world.

Salim
Lamrani is a treasury of powerful factual information.

—Howard
Zinn, author,A People’s History of the United States

Lamrani
brings forth valuable insight, much needed information, and honest judgment
while exposing the economic aggression perpetrated by U.S. leaders against the people of Cuba.

—Michael
Parenti, author,The Face of Imperialism

Professor
Lamrani’s brilliant study provides the most comprehensive and systematic
exposition and critique of Washington’s
extraterritorial application of sanctions against Cuba—it documents the human cost
and the criminal intent.